An Explanation of My Approach

Scientific Researches! New Discoveries in Pneumaticks...[1802] Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Scientific Researches! New Discoveries in Pneumaticks...[1802]
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Titles

Gillray's titles are (to put it kindly) idiosyncratic. They were usually engraved after the plate image was complete so he had complete freedom to mix upper and lower case, block and scripted letters, and vary size and strength for emphasis as long as he had room on the plate. Gillray also loved to include supplementary material. This included additional or alternative titles as in Crumbs of Comfort, or Old-Orthodox, Restoring Consolation to his Fallen Children [1782], or additional directives as in The Daily Advertiser. Vide Dundas's Speech in the House of Commons, 1797 [1797], or apt quotations as in the print Market Day. "Every Man has his Price" –Sir Robt Walpole and "Sic itur ad astra" [Virgil]. As he no doubt intended, all of these provide additional frames of reference for the prints and consequently increase their complexity. But for the lowly cataloguer this sometimes makes it difficult to know where the "real" title begins and ends.

The punctuation in the titles is equally idiosyncratic. Gillray will often hyphenate words that would not normally require hyphenation. Examples include The Magnanimous-Minister [1806], Confederated-Coalition... [1804], Making-Decent [1806], and Uncorking Old-Sherry [1805]. This can sometimes make online searches for print titles unintentionally challenging.

His alternative titles are accompanied by a variety of punctuation approaches. Sometimes he will simply use underscores, as in The Morning after Marriage_or_A Scene on the Continent [1788] or The Presentation_or_The Wise Mens (sic) Offering [1796]. But more often he likes to include additional punctuation before the "or," as in Shakespeare-Sacrificed;_or_The Offering to Avarice [1789] or Promis'd Horrors of the French Invasion,_or_Forcible Reasons for negociating (sic) a Regicide Peace [1796]. But sometimes he includes punctuation before and after the "or," as in Fashion before Ease;_or,_A good Constitution Sacrificed, for a Fantastick Form [1793].

There is no easy way to truly represent Gillray's variation and emphasis of fonts and letters in a readable catalog entry. In his account of the prints, Thomas Wright chose the approach of using all caps to represent Gillray's titles. M. Dorothy George followed suit in the British Museum Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires. No doubt to preserve their sanity, most of the online Gillray sites have chosen to use an intial cap for the first word of the title and lower case for everything else. But, alas, in a list like mine, the all caps approach simply looks cluttered and the single initial capital approach looks bare. In the interest of legibility, then, I have chosen to normalize the capitalization and punctuation, and abbreviate some of the titles in ways that are consistent with modern conventions. Mea culpa.

Date

The majority of Gillray plates are, in fact, dated. Sometimes reading that date is difficult, however, with the result that one archive might list the print on May 5th and another on May 15th, or June 1st vs June 7th.

I have included the most likely date of the first instance of the print. But where there is a question mark following a month, day or year, this usually means that the precise date is difficult to determine or that different archives have assigned different dates to the print.

Orientation

Gillray experimented with size and orientation just as he did with other techniques. So in addition to the standard notation of Landscape (L) and Portrait (P), I have added Square (SQ) and some cases, other significant qualities of the presentation such as a portrait or landscape oval (P-Oval) or (L-Oval), or a landscape print with multiple panels (L-Panel).

Size

Wherever possible I have used the British Museum's measurements of a print because they seem to reflect the plate size rather than the paper size, which can vary quite a bit depending upon how much cropping might have been done over the years. Even so, the measurements of a single print in multiple copies can vary—a result, I'm guessing, of human imprecision. The measurements included in this catalog represent just one of the copies of that print, and are necessarily approximate.

Collections

As I have indicated elsewhere, the collections represented here are ones that I am familiar with either because they are online or because they are close enough that I can visit them.